NASA Welcomes Discovery Crew Home for the Holidays

NASA Welcomes Discovery Crew Home for the Holidays

The Space Shuttle Discovery and its crew returned home Friday after a 13-day journey of more than 5.3 million miles in space. Discovery’s STS-116 mission successfully reconfigured the International Space Station’s power and cooling systems from a temporary setup to a permanent mode and added a new piece to the station’s backbone. Discovery’s Commander Mark Polansky, Pilot Bill Oefelein and mission specialists Nicholas Patrick, Bob Curbeam, Joan Higginbotham, Thomas Reiter and Christer Fuglesang landed Friday, Dec. 22, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, Fla., at 5:32 p.m. EST.

Reiter and Fuglesang are European Space Agency astronauts. After landing, Polansky told Mission Control at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Houston, “Seven thrilled people right here. We’re just really proud of the entire NASA team that put this together. Thank you, and I think it’s going to be a great holiday.” The flight was the second in a series of missions that are among the most complex in space history. Discovery’s crew rewired the station’s power system and delivered a key component of the station’s structure. The segment will enable future missions to attach a new set of solar arrays.

The mission involved intensive ground commands as the station’s power was shut down and rerouted in stages on two spacewalks. As systems were then powered up for the first time on their new channels, the station’s power system was in its final configuration, ready for further expansion with more solar arrays and laboratories to be launched in 2007. As part of the station power reconfiguration and assembly process, the station flight control team uplinked a total of 17,901 computer commands, averaging about 2,000 commands per day. During a typical day on the station, flight controllers give approximately 800 commands.

Read the complete Press Release